How To Find The Best Chocolate, Bar None

By Author: pangsiyan
Total Articles: 130
Comment this article

Good news for chocoholics: there is more high-quality stuff around, it does not come from areas that exploit child labour, it has genuine health benefits, and you can now find a decent stash on nearly every high street in Britain.

But the bad news is it's not so easy to tellproperly made chocolate from over-roasted rubbish. "Belgian", "organic", "Fairtrade" and even "70 per cent" are mere marketing buzzwords - and not one of those designations is a guarantee of good taste.

"It's all about how well the beans have been cared for," says Paul A Young, a top chocolatier whose book, Adventures With Chocolate, which attempts to define quality as well as the special characteristics of cocoa beans grown in different countries, has just been voted best chocolate cookbook in the world.

"Chocolate from Madagascar, Venezuela and Ecuador all tastes different and can all be delicious," he explains. "But if the beans have been poorly treated - over-roasting them is one common form of abuse - the result will be bad chocolate. It's like wine - the grapes and soil don't tell the full story. The quality of the product is down ...
... to the wine-maker, and in chocolate it's all about how the beans have been cultivated and processed."

As an avid educator as well as truffle-maker, Young stocks dozens of varieties in his London stores, priced at a not-inconsiderable £3.50 for a little 50g slab to around £8.95 for tiny rare artisanal blocks by cult manufacturers Amano, Tcho and Mast of Brooklyn.

Despite the price, he has dozens of addicts who come in "every single day for a little piece of something". It may well be its addictive qualities that are driving the high end of the chocolate market. The dark stuff with a high proportion of cocoa solids promotes the release of serotonin and dopamine, the so-called "love drug", as well as theobromine, which gives the kind of kick associated with an espresso.

Paul and his many rivals - "there has to be a chocolatier in nearly every town in Britain now" - may be at the top end of a rarefied market, but they are having a huge impact on the high street. "We have had people from M&S in looking at what we are doing," he says, and Liz Jarman, technical developer of confectionery products for Sainsbury's, confirms: "We get chocolatiers in to give workshops to our buyers and help them understand what's involved in producing a really good bar of chocolate. There's been a lot of press coverage around premium chocolate, and while with the recession we're not seeing a huge rise above the £2 price point, it's an area of growth we want to invest in. We're spending a lot of time on what cocoa should go into our products from the point of view of where it comes from. We currently offer a couple of bars of single origin - Santo Domingo and São Tomé, for example - which have quite distinct flavours, and are looking at adding more."

Expect to see guidance for connoisseurs coming to a shelf near you soon: "We have adventurous customers who started trial-purchasing different coffees when we explained their characteristics, and we might do that for chocolate," adds Jarman, who also finds space for emerging small brands like Chocolate Society. Interestingly, that company distributes the wildly expensive Valrhona, one of the finest sources of chocolate "couverture" (the blocks used by chefs and chocolatiers as their raw material), yet Jarman admits Sainsbury's, the first supermarket to make Valrhona available to British foodies, could not sustain the price for the French bars, which is double or treble the price of Menier and Green & Black's that dominate the home-baking shelves, along with their own brands.

drive from www.independent.co.uk